Last known location was somewhere at home, because I distinctly remember taking it out of my computer at work and putting it in my bag. The question is. . . where is it at home???

Anyways. . . work was frantic as expected from the first day back after an extended weekend. Nothing unmanageable, and I was even able to pick up a couple of new skills/responsibilities. Not too shabby. . .

I've been contracted (yet again) to help resurrect a dying system. This is one of the worst cases I've seen. . . with a confirmed dead power supply, and a possibly bad motherboard with three overloaded capacitors. . . at least the hard drive is salvageable. . . and I'm crossing my fingers for the CPU and RAM. . .

Quincy XII was acting a bit sluggish lately, so I threw more RAM at it. The increase from 1GB to 2GB saw some increase from performance, but unfortunately it looks like the new RAM I picked up didn't agree with the old RAM already in place. The system auto-downgraded itself from DDR400 to DDR320. . . I'll have to diagnose it some more before deciding whether the increase in quantity is enough to offset the decrease in quality. . .

Unfortunately, the pickings were slim for this year's Black Friday. Last year's was much more fulfilling. Nonetheless, I was able to restock a couple of spare HDDs, as well as picked up some other little stuff that is nice to have but not worth paying full price for.

Due to the fact that I spent all night last night prepping for battle, and got naught a wink's worth of sleep, I was drained pretty much all of today after the shopping spree. Considering that I used to be able to shrug off skipping a night's sleep a few years ago. . . this isn't good. I'm getting old. And that's not a good thing. . .

YanYan was a trusty comrade in today's excursion. . . lending a much needed helping hand in numerous occasions. I was tempted to head out without her because she looked so warm and comfy in bed in the morning, but looking back, I'm glad she came along. So to repay her dedication, I'm taking her shopping tomorrow and see what we'll pick up from that.

Epimelites will have to wait until I get home at this rate. I've spent more time prepping for Black Friday and handling maintenance operations for both Camelot Command and Freeport, I haven't had much time to do a whole lot else. . .

Turns out I was trying to make a call to the database for while inserting data. . . and the call was made before the data was inserted. Veediot. . .

Epimelites is now 80% completed and on track again to be finished in the coming weeks.

Happy happy happy. . . joy joy joy. . . happy happy happy. . . joy joy joy. . .

I passed with a 96% score (assuming a max score of 800 like the SATs). . .

I can pass this. . . I can pass this. . . I will it to happen. . . I will it to happen. . .

I'm still counting the blessings that I wasn't hit. . . but if another one comes through in the next couple of months, I can't guarantee that. Unfortunately, one person in our group was, and I really hate to see him go. He's a good guy, and happens to be our dungeon master in our current D&D game. So yeah. . . major suckage. . .

Spent Monday night with the guys continuing our AD&D game. While much progression was done in the way of moving the story along, Evil Twin and I were about to launch a mutiny because the rest of the group decided to spend over an hour discussing how to pull a couple of levers in a control room which controlled all the trap doors in the dungeon. I mean. . . geez. . . spending fifteen minutes or so discussing who stands where and observes the results, fine. But an hour theorizing what would happen if one lever is pulled one direction and whether that would effect all the other levers and whether the sun would come up the next day? Palor help me if I didn't draw my enchanted Bastard Sword and did some bashing and smashing and team killed. Drives me nuts. . .

It has rained incessently over the past several days, to the point where there was flooding at parts of the city. The rain finally stopped earlier this evening, although weather reports predict another deluge in the coming days. Joys of wonderous joys. . .

Of course. . . it don't matter squat until I complete my Net+. . . as that's the deal I made with myself (and with YanYan). . .

BTW, I have to say Firefox rules over Internet Explorer as a browser. Much better functionality, and I'm not getting annoying "ActiveX controls failed" errors as I used to on IE. The feature I like best is the "tabbed browsing". . . very beneficial for when I'm developing web apps. . . like right now!

With it I now have the motivation to tackle the Epimelites project again. It has grown from a quest for a simple Systems Admin script to something a bit more complicated. . . at least from the coding side. The PHP/MySQL calls aren't that difficult yet. . . its the stupid formatting that I'm trying to plow through. There has to be a easier way of doing this without breaking the script!!!

But enough of slacking off. . . I had set some goals for myself at the beginning of the year. . . and tacked on a couple of more during the course of the last ten months, and damn it, I'm going to see those goals accomplished before the year is over.